"We Are All Flint"

"What has always stuck me the most were the instances where people’s health was deteriorating. This has been true from the time I was a little girl to my work in Hinkley and beyond. What’s that common denominator? It’s usually the water. The one thing that sustains us all.

Communities across the country have been dealing with lead issues for years — but they’ve always fallen on a deaf ear. Flint is simply the perfect storm...

I didn’t discover Flint — the community wrote to me. We got out there and tried to sound the alarm. There’s almost always a community leader, and nine times out of 10, it’s going to be a mom. She starts gathering the community, setting up town meetings so we can inform people about what’s happening. We show folks how to protect themselves and their families. We try to work with the emergency contingency team that’s in place — we do that everywhere we go, and they usually don’t want to hear it. They want to run things their way, they think we’re just there to cause trouble, but that’s not the case at all...

We learned just this week that, in a memo, an EPA official stated that “Flint was not worth going out on a limb for.” The fact that someone from the governmental agency that is there to protect the health and the welfare of the people made such a disgusting comment will tell you where the problem is."

https://medium.com/@ErinBrockovich/we-are-all-flint-42fb50e700fe#.4bacikhp8

This is why I don't put up with arguments against action when they center around "this is how we've always done it and look at all the people who are fine!" or "This is how everyone operates, it's just how it is".

FB: Erin Brokovic on the Flint crisis - very worth reading
"Until we really start to listen — and I mean, until the municipalities, federal and state agencies start to listen to the people — instead of reacting to these disasters, we’re going to continue to create greater problems. Government officials and communities need to change their thinking in order to catch the crisis before it happens. And it starts with listening to the people. Right now, nobody is listening, so they come to me."

"The Dying Sea"

"There is just one catch. Between the needs of the city and the farmers sits the Salton Sea, which conservation will destroy. “The sea is the linchpin between Colorado River water and urban Southern California,” Michael Cohen, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, a water-policy think tank, says. Without the inflows, the sea, already shrinking, will recede dramatically, exposing miles of lake bed loaded with a hundred years’ worth of contaminants. Much of the wildlife will disappear—poisoned, starved, or driven off. The consequences for people around the region could be dire, too. Before irrigation, the valley was plagued by violent dust storms. With the water gone, the lake bed could emit as much as a hundred tons of fine, caustic dust a day, leading to respiratory illness in the healthy and representing an acute hazard for people with compromised immune systems. No one knows how far that dust can travel on the wind. Mary Nichols, the state’s top air-quality official, says, “The nightmare scenario is the pictures we’ve all seen of the Dust Bowl that contributed to the formation of California in the first place.”...

Looking at the sea can turn the mind poetical. This is the landscape after people, you think. This is the landscape toward the end of the fish, in the last years of the birds, at the beginning of the dust."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-dying-sea

This is fascinating - the history of the accidentally artificially-created lake and the way that humans and natural ecosystems have been built around it. And the asthma and lung diseases happening now.

FB: "Driving through the farmland of the Imperial Valley inspires awe and indignation. Like a jungle, it seethes: yellow-green Sudan grass; rough, inky sugar beets; alfalfa as bright as a banker’s shade; mixed lettuces that grade from light green to violet. “You could not paint a picture that is a better color,” Kay Pricola, the executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, says. “We are dependent on the water. We exist because of the water.” The unplanted land is grayish, crusted, flocked with crystalline white salt, like a Christmas attraction in a Southern California mall.

There are four hundred and fifty farmers in the Imperial Valley, some of them descendants of the pioneers and many of them quite prosperous. In addition to the forage crops, they grow much of the winter produce eaten in this country. It is hot in the valley, up to a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer months. The farmers tend to travel. Their wives may prefer to spend summers in La Jolla. Half the land is tenant-farmed; in some cases, the owners live elsewhere. “It functions as a plantation,” a local activist told me. Larry Cox, a prominent valley farmer who is the president of the Imperial County Farm Bureau, disputes the characterization. He says that treating farmland as an investment is more like owning an office building in San Diego and hiring someone else to run it."

"On Spinsters by Briallen Hopper"

"my fundamental resistance to Spinster isn’t just about the bait and switch of its title and content. It comes down to the way Bolick’s small and not especially spinster-based archive radically limits the potential of her book, both culturally and politically...

When I was first learning how to be a spinster, my mentors were three straight African American women, 10 or 20 years ahead of me, who spent long years of their youth in a small mostly white town in suburban New Jersey. All of them had lives full of friendship, faith, family, community, political purposefulness, significant caregiving responsibilities, dazzling professional success, and, occasionally or eventually, real romance. But they also had lives marked by the demographic reality of

blackness in America

...

These women taught me to question my own entitled white-girl assumptions about relationships and marital status: that marriage (or spinsterhood) is a simple matter of figuring out what you want and waiting for it to happen, or making it happen...

I’ve come to realize that I owe an immeasurable debt to the intersecting groups of people who have historically been barred from the privileges of marriage by law and demography, and have learned to create intimate lives apart from it. In other words, I’m indebted to queer people and to African Americans, and to all who have seen their loves and families treated as nonexistent or pathological, and who have had marriage used as a weapon against them or as a compulsory straight and narrow path to equality. These people are more than “awakeners”: they have done the hard work of loving and world-making in defiance of the powers that be...

It was the spinsters who made me. Who made farm-share feasts with me for our family dinners and watched

Golden Girls

with me every night. Who sent me silver-framed photographs of us at a Houston diner, and glitter-framed photographs of us at Graceland, and magnet-backed photographs to put on my fridge of us sharing a bed at a Palm Springs hotel. Who talked with me for hours on the phone as we lay a thousand miles apart in bed in the dark until one of us finally fell asleep. Who asked me to help them choose their mother’s gravestone. Who told me about their abortions. Who bought me a dress for my yet-to-be-adopted daughter. Who made me the aunt of their one-eyed Chihuahua. Who sat next to me in church."

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/on-spinsters

I would be interested in the masculine-version of the essay (if that exists; like, the bachelor isn't really the same thing...)

Thinking about that further, there is definitely something about a woman-alone, something where our world still needs women to be owned by some identifiable man/family structure, or else they/we are sort of up for grabs and usable. Because they don't have to struggle with this, maybe men who are spinsters don't need to find the wisdom and untraditional families that women who are spinsters do.

(Credit to AT)

Related: "The Space between Families"; how the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage positions single people

FB: A phenomenal essay on the idea of spinsterhood, and coupledom, and the relationships in which you can find meaningful love

"Donald Trump Is Successfully Conning The Entire Country"

"Trump’s claim was delivered with such gusto that Oliver began to doubt what he knew to be true, even though he knew Trump was lying.

That’s the power of gaslighting.

This form of psychological abuse typically plays out like so: The gaslighter states something false with such intensity and conviction that whoever is on the receiving end is confused and begins to doubt their own perspective.

The term comes from a 1938 play called Gaslight, in which a husband drives his wife crazy by secretly altering things in her house and making her question her grip on reality...

Stern said it’s extremely difficult to get gaslighters to take responsibility for their actions, because instead of expressing shame or contrition, they are likely to feign outrage and attack the questioner."

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/donald-trump-lies-gaslighting_us_56e95d21e4b065e2e3d7ee82?

FB: "According to Stern, the best way to handle a gaslighter is to disengage and let go of the relationship."

"China Fences In Its Nomads, and an Ancient Life Withers"

"Gere, who like many Tibetans uses a single name, is filled with regret. Like hundreds of thousands of pastoralists across China who have been relocated into bleak townships over the past decade, he is jobless, deeply indebted and dependent on shrinking government subsidies to buy the milk, meat and wool he once obtained from his flocks.

“We don’t go hungry, but we have lost the life that our ancestors practiced for thousands of years,” he said...

the policies, based partly on the official view that grazing harms grasslands, are increasingly contentious. Ecologists in China and abroad say the scientific foundations of nomad resettlement are dubious. Anthropologists who have studied government-built relocation centers have documented chronic unemployment, alcoholism and the fraying of millenniums-old traditions...

Not everyone is dissatisfied. Bater, 34, a sheep merchant raised on the grasslands, lives in one of the new high-rises that line downtown Xilinhot’s broad avenues. Every month or so he drives 380 miles to see customers in Beijing, on smooth highways that have replaced pitted roads. “It used to take a day to travel between my hometown and Xilinhot, and you might get stuck in a ditch,” he said. “Now it takes 40 minutes.” Talkative, college-educated and fluent in Mandarin, Bater criticized neighbors who he said want government subsidies but refuse to embrace the new economy, much of it centered on open-pit coal mines...

Experts say the relocation efforts often have another goal, largely absent from official policy pronouncements: greater Communist Party control over people who have long roamed on the margins of Chinese society."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/world/asia/china-fences-in-its-nomads-and-an-ancient-life-withers.html?_r=0

Super chilling.

"We Are All Flint"

"What has always stuck me the most were the instances where people’s health was deteriorating. This has been true from the time I was a little girl to my work in Hinkley and beyond. What’s that common denominator? It’s usually the water. The one thing that sustains us all.

Communities across the country have been dealing with lead issues for years — but they’ve always fallen on a deaf ear. Flint is simply the perfect storm...

I didn’t discover Flint — the community wrote to me. We got out there and tried to sound the alarm. There’s almost always a community leader, and nine times out of 10, it’s going to be a mom. She starts gathering the community, setting up town meetings so we can inform people about what’s happening. We show folks how to protect themselves and their families. We try to work with the emergency contingency team that’s in place — we do that everywhere we go, and they usually don’t want to hear it. They want to run things their way, they think we’re just there to cause trouble, but that’s not the case at all...

We learned just this week that, in a memo, an EPA official stated that “Flint was not worth going out on a limb for.” The fact that someone from the governmental agency that is there to protect the health and the welfare of the people made such a disgusting comment will tell you where the problem is."

https://medium.com/@ErinBrockovich/we-are-all-flint-42fb50e700fe#.4bacikhp8

This is why I don't put up with arguments against action when they center around "this is how we've always done it and look at all the people who are fine!" or "This is how everyone operates, it's just how it is".

FB: Erin Brokovic on the Flint crisis - very worth reading
"Until we really start to listen — and I mean, until the municipalities, federal and state agencies start to listen to the people — instead of reacting to these disasters, we’re going to continue to create greater problems. Government officials and communities need to change their thinking in order to catch the crisis before it happens. And it starts with listening to the people. Right now, nobody is listening, so they come to me."

"The Free-Speech Crisis"

"The value of intellectual freedom is far from self-evident. It’s hardly natural to defend the rights of one person over the feelings of a group; to put up with all the trouble that comes with free minds and free expression; to stand beside the very people who repel you. After the massacre at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, in January, even defenders of free speech couldn’t help wondering why the cartoonists hadn’t just avoided Islam and the Prophet, given the sensitivities involved...

It takes an active effort to resist the impulse to silence the jerks who have wounded you...

But, in some ways, an even greater danger than violence or jail is the internal mute button known as self-censorship. Once it’s activated, governments and armed groups don’t have to bother with threats. Here self-censorship is on the rise out of people’s fear of being pilloried on social media. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been masterful at creating an atmosphere in which there are no clear rules, so that intellectuals and artists stifle themselves in order not to run afoul of vague laws and even vaguer social pressure.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/mute-button

Informative to know what the fears are, to see what the value is here. I don't have these fears, I don't see inidcations that this is goign to happen, but I understand the cocnern.

"The Web We Have to Save"

"More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.

On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.

But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying."
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

I'm thinking back to the pre-FB internet, or before facebook was kinda my homepage/when I still had a homepage... (was it google? probably?). And ya, I remember browsing as a real thing and having bookmarked pages I would cycle through. And sharing websites with friends instead of just webpages.

Reading this, and thinking about how over-saturated we are with social networks, I think it's very possible that we will get back to the website world. Or some version of it; but a version where we can still relate socially somehow; send a signal to say 'I am here on this website! Come join me!'

(honestly, though, I think that a lot of the changes he is so concerned about are because a lot more people have joined the internet since he was on it last, it's become a general past time for everyone and it takes a lot less effort to own a little piece of it; you don' thave to be a blogger or looking to find an esoteric community or building a tool - you can just be)

"Niche Product"

"The design of Sygiel’s underwear takes into account aspects of femininity that aren’t discussed much outside of middle-school bathroom stalls, and wicks them away. Early prototypes involved a plastic layer, but that didn’t feel right. “We didn’t want a rain slicker,” she said. Then she designed a three-layer leak- and stain-resistant fabric made from nylon, lycra, and micro-polyester which she called Underlux (patent pending). She stitched the samples herself. “I had a whole group of friends who would text me when they got their period,” she said. “That was one of the most frustrating things about testing: I could only use them twenty-five per cent of the month.” Now Dear Kate, which is headquartered on Varick Street, in SoHo, and manufactures in Queens, has a small, all-female staff that tests prototypes in group try-on sessions in the company ladies’ room. Investors have supplied more than a million dollars, and a recent Kickstarter campaign raised another hundred and sixty thousand, enabling Sygiel to expand into yoga pants. “We know better than anyone what you need in your pants if you’re not wearing underwear,” she said."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/niche-product

"Theresa Harris in 'Baby Face (1933) – The First "Best Black Friend" (BBF)?"

"the 1933 drama "Baby Face" (it started about an hour before I started typing this) - a film that may have been the first to introduce the BBF stock character (BBF of course means Best Black Friend – a usually black actress cast as the leading white actress’ best friend; and even though they’re supposed to be “equals,” the BBF is often 2 dimensional, there strictly to support her white friend, aiding her in eventually overcoming some personal obstacle)."

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/theresa-harris-in-baby-face-1933-the-first-best-black-friend-bbf-20150715

Mostly how I saw myself represented in media growing up. From an early age, though, I understood that I was supposed to be grateful to have been included - but to actually be identifying with and caring about the main white character.

"Shutting Down Donald Trump’s Rallies Isn’t the Way To Defeat Him"

"Many Trump opponents, from petition signers trying to deny Trump use of the venue to protesters at the rally, wanted to stop Trump from speaking. That’s always a tempting when someone is saying things as stupid and insulting as Trump does on a regular basis.

But it’s the wrong response. Progressives should try to use such an event to communicate a counter-message to the large audience available, stretching far beyond Trump fans. That message is, first of all, that Trump—as a leader and through implementation of his ideas—would be bad for you and bad for the country. Second, there are better choices for leaders and better ways of identifying the real problems of the country and their solutions (taxing rich people like Trump more and more humanely adopt a steady flow of immigrants, just to start)...

the main goal of the protesters should not be to silence him, but to exercise political jiu-jitsu that takes advantage of his notoriety to communicate the progressive counter-message, a message that includes the strong support of free speech, equality, democracy and other values of both the left and of American culture as a whole. The left should not embrace an approach that could be seen as mimicking in any way Trump’s hostility to free speech and incitement to violence or suppression of opponents."

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18990/donald-trump-rally-chicago-shutdown

I have this negative reaction to news about these anti-Trump shut-down-the-rally protests. I just feel like it's not the productive way to respond; it's reactive and it feels sort of... entitled? Like, "I don't want for this to be happening, so I am going to try to make it not be happening".

There are real reasons why Trump rallies are happening, why people travel hundreds of miles and outfit themselves in Trump gear and get pumped up. One of those reasons: A lot of people feel silenced by the dominant political powers in this country. They are excited to finally have a voice.

Shutting down rallies sort of says "I don't want to engage with your realities or your reasons or your lives, I have decided that I don't like this and I am going to try to stop it". Shutting down rallies says "shut up!" to silenced people.

Always, always, always the best way to address this would be to communicate, to have real dialogues with people, to investigate the fear and anger, to explore the differences in perspective. I don't want to do it, because there is a lot of racism going on in that dynamic and I don't know if a cross-race dialogue would be productive, so I think it's all these young white people who are in a position to be able to really start talking.

Shutting down Trump won't make his supporters' problems go away, and if we claim to care about social justice we have to care about their problems too. Right now, it seems like people are just trying to go back to a time when we didn't have to think about the rural Midwest.

"No Less Than Holy: Finding Communion in #BlackLivesMatter"

"I had felt the same, undergirding goodwill at the occupation of the Minneapolis 4th Precinct police station. In and amidst the chants and signs and speeches, there were hugs and gripped shoulders, smiles of recognition, and introductions between friends of friends. They used words like “beautiful,” “sacred,” and “love.” A friend who lives by the tenets of the Catholic Worker movement, and who was maced by police officers on the fourth night of the protest, described the assistance he received from strangers — who poured milk over his eyes and then provided him with dry clothes — as no less than “holy.”...

Black Lives Matter’s logistical organization of the protest at the 4th Precinct largely inspired the goodwill professed by participants there. Organizers solicited and accepted donations of food, clothes, firepits, coffee, bail money, even bodywork. When author Ryan Berg asked a volunteer how he might assist, she surveyed her surroundings and said, “We might need more lids for coffee in a few hours.” Preparedness did not protect protesters from vigilante or police violence, but it did hold a space within each of us for compassion."

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/no-less-than-holy-finding-communion-in-blacklivesmatter/8404

There is something in here about the central role of community, and knowledge that I think we have American culture. I have had so many magical moments, when people are really reaching the height of their abilities to use their best skills, because of communities that are supportive and thoughtfully organized to recognize human needs.

I thinks this I also helpful for expressing what protests are actually like; the primary emotion isn't anger, it really is motivated by love and value and respect for the people around you. Dan the people you are marching for,

FB: "Physical aloneness by itself has no teeth compared to existential isolation, the kind that arises from a distrust in other people’s desire or ability to embrace you. Wanting relief from this more insidious suspicion brought me through the company’s doors. It’s the same relief I was startled and grateful to find in Black Lives Matter protests this fall."

"Slip On These "Whiteness Goggles" and the Violence of Cultural Appropriation Disappears"

"Peet printed images of white people engaging in cultural appropriation on tall banners. Frozen in time, Miley Cyrus joyfully twerks with her tongue in its signature position, a hipster wears a keffiyeh, and Katy Perry smiles in herAmerican Music Awards geisha costume. Behind them, another vision of whiteness—a violent one—is printed in red: Miley stands out against a scene of police in Ferguson, a bohemian white girl in a feathered headdress is juxtaposed with an iconic photo of a mountain of buffalo skulls, and a still from Iggy Azalea's "Bounce" video frames a portrait of colonizing Queen Victoria.

To accompany the images, Peet constructed special glasses made from cardboard and red plastic. These are “whiteness goggles,” a sign explains. When you put them on and look at the images, suddenly the red, violent image disappears...

Peet himself is a white immigrant to the US from Britain—he works as a politically minded printmaker with the Justseeds Collective. To develop this show, he worked with a group of advisors (including artists Sara Siestreem, Sharita Towne, andGabe Flores) who offered ideas for how to make art exploring cultural appropriation, critiqued his ideas, and pushed him to develop more creative and rigorous ways of addressing the issues at hand. "
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/slip-on-these-whiteness-goggles-and-the-violence-of-cultural-appropriation-disappears

This is too great. Such amazing communication.

"The Brussels attack is Europe's new reality"

"As ISIS loses its state, it is shifting emphasis to terror attacks

The world of violent jihadism is a competitive one, and ISIS's greatest rival has always been al-Qaeda. Their antagonism has many roots, some going back decades, to the war in Afghanistan, but it is today expressed both as literal war in Syria, where they fight for territory, and as a broader but more abstract war of ideology, over which group can rightfully claim the mantle of jihadism's global vanguard...

"ISIS is a state that has millions of dollars that it can spend on these kinds of operations," McCants went on. "We're not talking about al-Qaeda hiding out in Pakistan. We're talking about an actual government that has money to put behind plots and has very motivated people, many of them with European passports that can carry them out.""

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11284558/brussels-attack-europe-isis-terrorism

I am glad to understand this. Or, like, glad feels like an innapropriate word to use in this response, but I can't think of another. I am not emotionally made glad, but it feels useful in a way that is soothing.

It's strange being an American liberal and interacting with news about terrorist attacks in Western countries. Part of me is so involved in my anger about the post-9/11 politics that launched reactionary wars (and war crimes) and surveillance policies and this era of Islamophobia. In the absolutist world of American political rhetoric, condemning terrorism can feel like a validation of those Bush-era decisions. I think that's why you see so many things pop up about terrorism in non-Western countries, stuff that can be mourned and spoken about without violating American-Liberal sensibilities.

And beyond that, I don't know that I am really a part of this conversation, I don't know if there is anything productive for me to learn (much less contribute). My sadness and confusion about these attacks is not novel and I don't deserve any attention for it, and I am also averse to politicizing these deaths with my concerns about retaliatory prejudices.

I want to figure out how to process my own reactions fully, including the fears that my political identity stigmatizes, and support victims in a non-political manner. And I am full of questions of "Why?" and "What next?".

So I am glad that this article explained ISIS's motivations and some of the context of their decision-making outside if the hand-waving of "Anti-Western Jihadism".

"The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating"

"One reason that such characters seem appealing is that, ironically, they are reassuring. They give the comforting impression that anyone could thrive in isolation as they do. This reassurance can be summed up in the declaration made by Henrik Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann at the end of AnEnemy of the People (1882), after the locals have persecuted him for revealing that the town’s tourist baths are contaminated. Stockmann declares: ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.’

The great loners embody an idea of freedom from the vagaries and stresses of social life. As human beings, we are vulnerable to each other’s moods, proclivities, ideologies, perceptions, knowledge and ignorance. We are vulnerable to our society’s conventions, policies and hierarchies. We need other people’s blessing and often their help in order to get resources. When we’re young and when we’re old, we are vulnerable enough that our lives are happy only if other people choose to care about us...

Such accounts are confirmed by a growing body of psychological evidence that indicates that supportive social contact, interaction and inclusion are fundamentally important to a minimally decent human life and, more deeply, to human wellbeing. For the most part, we needone another; we cannot flourish or even survive without each other. These fundamental needs are the ground for a range of rights that we neglect, but should not, including the rights to be part of a network of social connections.

In our individualistic, western culture, where the romantic image of the great loner prevails, it will take some argumentative muscle to show that we should adopt a different model of the ‘strongest man’."

https://aeon.co/opinions/what-lies-behind-the-myth-of-the-strong-self-reliant-loner?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I strongly agree with this thesis, and I wish the essay was longer.

I want to see a turn from the American value in the family to an American value in the community; I want to see selfishness be recognized for what it is, instead of cynically encouraged as part of capitalism. I want us to see ourselves as part of each others' stories, and see other people as parts of ours. I want more cultural examples of how to be vulnerable, and worthy of others' vulnerability; I want our idea of strength to recognize that strong people are maintained by having strong communities. 

Related: friends regulate each other emotions; https://medium.com/life-learning/the-bigger-your-dream-the-more-important-your-team-399dea6fff4d#.fx7ecu4gv

"#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement"

"The jury had been deliberating for 16 hours on Zimmerman’s fate. When the verdict was announced, she learned of it first through Facebook: not guilty of second degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter.

“Everything went quiet, everything and everyone,” Garza says now. “And then people started to leave en masse. The one thing I remember from that evening, other than crying myself to sleep that night, was the way in which as a black person, I felt incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed and incredibly enraged. Seeing these black people leaving the bar, and it was like we couldn’t look at each other. We were carrying this burden around with us every day: of racism and white supremacy. It was a verdict that said: black people are not safe in America.”

Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, “essentially a love note to black people”, and posted it on her page. It ended with: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

Garza’s close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garza’s words with her friends online. She used a hashtag each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments...

Along with Cullors and Tometi, she organised a “freedom ride” to Ferguson under the auspices of the #blacklivesmatter campaign. More than 500 people signed up from 18 different cities across America. When they reached Ferguson, Garza was astonished to see her own phrase mirrored back at her on protest banners and shouted in unison by people she had never met...  There are now over 26 Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States. From one heartfelt Facebook post, it has spawned a new civil rights movement...

The most notable difference is that, in 2015, there are no leaders in the conventional sense: no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, no single charismatic voice that claims to speak for the many. Several people I interview insist this is a strength: they make the bleak point that, historically, single leaders of civil rights movements have almost always been assassinated. They have also been male.

“We have a lot of leaders,” insists Garza, “just not where you might be looking for them. If you’re only looking for the straight black man who is a preacher, you’re not going to find it.”...

“Social media’s significance is that it is recognising different incidents that might have gone unnoticed and sewing them together as a coherent whole,” says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. “And that means we’re forced to recognise very serious structural issues.”"
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement

Reading this, it occurs to me how frustrating it must have been for Arab Springs activists to hear Twitter, etc... take credit for their movements .

We have this highly mythologized narrative about civil rights movements, and I worry that in the absence of the signifiers that are part of that story, people will start inserting social media companies as saviors.

Lastly - is there a definition of a "civil rights movement"? Because this has always been bigger than civil rights, and this is about anti-racism/racial equality. So what are we saying?

Related: A great essay on leadership in the 60s civil rights movement, and in today's #BlackLivesMatter;

The New York Magazine article on the twitter movement

"American Electoral: Seven strange days on the trail with Jack Hitt and Kevin Baker"

"This is also the year that the national media seems to have finally, completely swallowed itself. I call it “The Curse of Teddy White,” the man who first made a cottage industry out of covering the inside game, the “process,” with The Making of the President, 1960, and its five sequels.

Earnest as White was, his coverage was generally about as penetrating as a loofa sponge. Every mainstream candidate he liked came off in a beatific light, including Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. People he didn’t like, such as George Wallace, were mostly ignored. Protestors, such as a group of pickets demonstrating against Barry Goldwater’s Neolithic stand on race at the 1964 Republican convention, were dismissed as “beardies.”

White’s successors have delved deeper and deeper into process, but probed less and less into the issues—all the while making themselves more and more into celebrities.

One could cite any one of a dozen major media commentators who have moved from being reporters to God-like campaign consultants, pompously telling us just how the candidates should be doing everything...

A. J. Liebling said that there were two ways to cover any media circus (and every presidential campaign is but the most rarefied media circus there is): in the thick of it with a push broom cleaning up the mess or from a balcony with a cocktail in hand. We’ll be in the thick of it, with a cocktail.""

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/american-electoral/?clear

This is so enjoyable. It's a day-by-day account of the primaries by two reporters traveling to the different primary sites and stealing lawn signs and making observations like - -

"The prevailing establishment narrative—its Democratic version, at least—is one that Bill did a lot to popularize: the idea that if you “play by the rules,” work hard and get a college degree or two, you’ll make out fine in the globalized economy of the twenty-first century. But not much of that feels true anymore.

If many people all across America seem to have been flirting with what were once considered fringe candidates such as Trump or Sanders, it’s because the establishment’s solutions now ring even crazier."

And -

"Ah, Amtrak! America’s rolling showcase for technological regression. We sped along at a pace just over half as fast as a passenger train in 1930. We had our dinner not in Carolina, but parked in Washington’s Union Station, where the engine was switched from electric to diesel. They had to cut that lights for that, so we ate in full darkness until the porter handed us a glow stick to aid us in aiming our forks.

Our porter merely chortled when we asked her if the wi-fi worked"

FB: this series of reports on the primaries is super enjoyable (Jack Hitt from a past era of This American Life!) "A. J. Liebling said that there were two ways to cover any media circus (and every presidential campaign is but the most rarefied media circus there is): in the thick of it with a push broom cleaning up the mess or from a balcony with a cocktail in hand. We’ll be in the thick of it, with a cocktail."

"Why It’s So Hard for Men to See Misogyny"

"When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives?...

misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around...

even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation... Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize."

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/05/_yesallwomen_in_the_wake_of_elliot_rodger_why_it_s_so_hard_for_men_to_recognize.html?wpsrc=upworthy

This is old but still very relevant, very all the time. 

I will never forget the time that I was hanging out with a female friend and two male friends at a party, and we noticed a mutual acquaintance (male) interacting with a young woman a few feet away. My female friend and I turned to each other and rolled our eyes because she was clearly completely uninterested in him and trying to walk away, and then we heard our male friends approvingly observing that the guy was totally going to have sex tonight. Like we were seeing two completely different interactions. My female friend and I explained what was actually happening, and a few seconds later the woman walked away. And I was a little traumatized, thinking about times that I might have come off as super interested.

I can only guess that men have an idea that women will scowl and be rude if they aren't interested, and it just occurs to me now that this expectation might be why I have so many male friends with huge egos (sorry if you're reading this, but you all know this about yourself, and I put up with you despite it <3) - like, maybe they live in worlds where they have never been rejected, and women are always being really nice to them. 

It really does feel dangerous to be openly negative towards men - because men will (a) often fail to respond to negativity by going away or whatever, and (b) will return that negativity. In my experience, randos on the street can start saying/doing worse things, people at parties or whatever wilł look surprised and confused and act super offended as though you have just been the worst human ever. But kind of the worst is when you are expressing your lack of desire to continue to interact and the other person laughs or patronizes that negative expression, like you are a child and can't know your own feelings. And so it's much easier to pretend not to notice or just smile until they go away.

And in these situations, no one is really there to come back you up - it's really strongly accepted in our society that men are going to be imposing themselves on women and women are going to be passively gate-keeping. So, if you start something as a woman, bystanders will bystand and you are going to have to finish it yourself.